Zola Jesus confronts death on menacing new song “Soak”: Stream

A second look at her upcoming album, Okovi

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Okovi, the forthcoming album from Zola Jesus, looks to be one of her darkest pieces yet, drawn from a place of “loss and reconciliation.” While putting together the LP, she “endured people very close to me trying to die, and others trying desperately not to. Meanwhile, I was fighting through a haze so thick I wasn’t sure I’d find my way to the other side.”

Death lurked around every corner of Okovi’s lead single, last month’s “Exhumed”. On the follow-up track, “Soak”, the Grim Reaper is now the star of the show. According to Zola, the industrial and unnervingly dark song is written from the perspective of a serial killer’s victim that’s about to be drowned.

“I was thinking about this crucial moment inside the victim’s mind, when she knows she’s going to die,” Zola explained in a press statement. “She thinks back at her life and the futility of the decisions she made, when, in the end her life would be cut short against her will.”

“What’s the point of trying to navigate life if you don’t even get to choose how it ends?” continued Zola. “Instead of letting her fate be determined by someone else, she takes back control and turns it around, so instead, in her mind, she is choosing to die. She lets the killer assist her in suicide, as she gets tossed into the water and slowly drowns. Through writing this song the story evolved within me, and I saw how it mirrored my own feelings inside.”